[O]ne year after the UK triggered its withdrawal from the EU, a unique sound and picture archive has been created by a university lecturer who toured the country canvassing the views of voters.
Alice Myers, lecturer of photography at the University of Cumbria, and artist Ali Avery embarked on a two-week tour of the UK last April to listen and record the views of everyday voters. They stopped at 50-mile intervals and knocked on every number 50 door they could find, documenting their journey photographically as they went.
Now the team have created an accessible online sound archive. The clips are available to view on a handy map on the website and Alice and Ali have made a series of podcasts to form an audio tour of the country.
The ‘Indefinite Article’ project aimed to capture the opposing views of leave and remain voters up and down the country. Alice and Ali got the idea came from a sense that there were growing divisions following the Brexit vote and that people were not talking to other people with whom they disagreed.
Alice and Ali wanted to reach beyond the headlines to find out how real people living in towns and cities across the country felt about Brexit and much to their surprise, they found the two sides shared a number of beliefs.
For instance, everyone that Alice and Ali talked to thought Theresa May would win a landslide election. Many people they spoke to predicted the issues with the Northern Irish border but felt no-one else was considering it.
“The podcast is a call for dialogue, for taking time to understand the people around us. We hope that everyone listening will encounter surprising and new ways of thinking about these all too familiar issues, no matter what their political persuasion,” said Alice Myers, lecturer of photography at the University of Cumbria.
Alice and Ali have received funding from the VACM Award Edinburgh to take the audio tour to Dumfries in the summer, after which they hope to visit the Edinburgh Festival and then return to the places that formed part of their journey.
The audio tour includes contributions from people in Anglesey, Denbigh, Liverpool, Belfast, Lancashire, Cumbria, Dumfriesshire, Mid Lothian, the North East, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.
